Re: Generation
Lessons from the Pandemic
Ten thousand years ago, in early March, Covid-19 was the ‘boomer remover’. At this time – still the Old World in the UK, by some measure – a substantial amount of online discourse comprised millennial and Gen Z eye-rolling about the looming plight of the old. The young literally expressed excitement at cashing in on cheap flights to holiday destinations. A sense of indignance was palpable. This wasn’t just about spring break. It was active engagement with the respite that this crisis posed.
Needless to say, it didn’t age very well. Alongside charges of media ‘scaremongering’ in the wake of big festival cancellations like SXSW, the global enormity of Covid-19 has not so much made us eat our words as throw the soup out of the window. As people of all ages die in droves and frontline workers in the UK are sacrificed as collateral, the inter-generational indifference of six weeks ago seems to belong to the comedic canon of a different age, maybe even a different planet.
But it’s not a different age or planet. If anything, the last month has shown us just how fucked everything already was. And it’s for that reason that pausing, taking stock and zooming in is even more vital. What was actually going on that the prospective isolation, illness and mass death of over 65s was not only inconsequential but a blessing to some young commentators?
I suggest in this piece that the flippant indifference suggested by the ‘boomer remover’ is not simply a matter of intergenerational discontent fuelled by age-stratified inequality. While I acknowledge the material underpinnings of this inequality, I put forward that the conceptual purchase of ‘generation’ is in itself political, in particular owing to its synonymity with a ‘reproductive cohort’. Fashioning generation as reproductive cohort, I argue, is a game of destiny, whereby the lot of each age-bracketed group is frozen in time – with only descendants to blame or thank, and successors to half-heartedly advocate for.
My argument follows a path that has three stops. The first is empirical and is marked by a sign that has been written and rewritten so many times the word is barely legible: neoliberalism. Swingeing cuts, marketisation, labour crushed and cheapened. Forty years of eroding the Keynesian social contract, with the deal finally sealed by Tory/Lib Dem austerity from 2010.
There can be no doubt that the young disproportionately suffered at the hands of the coalition government, as many of us who came of age during the Great Recession can attest to first-hand. University fees were tripled, Education Maintenance Allowance was scrapped, and in lieu of any real youth job market post-crash, apprentice schemes were introduced at the grotesque wage of £3/hr. And if you couldn’t land any work at all, claiming Jobseekers Allowance came attached to unpaid labour in a supermarket via the ‘Workfare’ scheme. Naturally, this was the context in which the gig economy was born, because who the hell wants to work full time in Poundland for fifty quid a week.
Then there was the business of shelter. As we know, one of the intentional consequences of council housing selloffs under Thatcher was the construction of a rentier society. These things take about a ‘generation’ to fully establish. True enough, twenty-five years of Right-to-Buy and Buy-to-Let meant that by the 2010s, the unregulated private rented sector in Britain was the main source of housing for young people – with the vast majority of landlords over the age of 55.
This threw the age stratification of inequality into a sharper relief that was literally closer to home. Indeed, the pensioner charging you a two grand a month for a mouldy ceiling and broken boiler could well have been the beneficiary of social housing in their twenties or thirties. Just like the politicians who voted for tripled tuition fees were likely to have benefited from free higher education before New Labour. This wasn’t so much about kicking away the ladder as it was about just extending it forever: a constant, Sisyphean toil where the advertised destination is still some version of good-life security – if we could only just stop eating toast and using iPhones. Keep climbing, keep paying.
Whichever way you turn it, the age stratification of inequality in the UK is a thing. And in the wake of a rigged referendum in which over 65s ultimately voted to trap the British public in a tax haven, a sense of generational disenfranchisement has intensified along political axes too. In this context it’s not difficult to understand why, in the brief moments before the seriousness of Covid-19 was fully understood, the prospect of being able to afford your first holiday in years was welcome – while Barbara and Mick cancel their seventh luxury cruise of the decade on your rental dime.
But the sense of temporary relief from economic exclusion by a system geared towards the interests of the propertied is only one dimension of this antagonism. And if this time is teaching us anything, it’s that taking responsibility for reaching beyond that antagonism is the harder, more vital task.
This brings us to the next signpost on my path – a theoretical proposition. Let us dust off the lichen (#WeAreTheVirus) and reveal the lettering: Generation as Reproductive Ideology. First, reproduction: as a concept, it is generally framed in a heteropatriarchal capitalist society in terms of inheritance. Power and stuff are transmitted across new ‘generations’, just as genes and traits are (as part and parcel of power and stuff). In such circumstances, children are either benefactors or burdens, good for only their labour – or worse, ‘waste’, as Cindi Katz has argued.
To speak of generations past and present – even in liberatory terms – invokes these reproductive politics. Looking after future ‘generations’ by recycling or planting trees involves making a statement about the future as a place that is full of worthy benefactors. We don’t want to make the same promises for the now, because now sucks and it’s too complicated; it’s easier to throw our weight behind a hypothetical cohort of yet-to-be than try to change what we’ve been dealt. Equally, it’s nice to see the ‘boomer’ as the generational source of our miseries; we simply inherited a system that adversely affects us.
The ideological tricks of generation lead us to the final stop – a political point: that these reproductive politics of ‘generation’ obfuscate capital. Indeed, using generation as a proxy for a reproductive cohort ultimately naturalises the inequalities that exist within it: time freezes, what you possess is an inherited given, the only thing left is to ensure that future generations don’t suffer the same fate – or that they are able to cash in. Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg owns your face and you’re donating your old swimming goggles to your local intensive care unit.
During my own research on millennial precarity and renting, this obfuscatory business of generation was very hard to ignore. I spoke to folks from a wide range of life’s walks, some living in council housing with their families, some privately renting but also property owning. All of them, including the asset-rich, had a profound sense of themselves as occupying a millennial ‘condition’, attributable to their parents’ and grandparents’ political and economic decisions. And it was indeed in this process of attribution that political agency was often surrendered.
The irony is that in the process of emphasising inter-generational disparity, we are missing a key point of what generation is or could be: the act of generating and of regenerating, resisting, adapting and replenishing in perpetuity with and for each other across space and time. Obviously this is already happening; it’s not my intention here to side-line the many revolutionary acts occurring every day among and between older and younger people. If anything, the inter-generational organising of this moment puts paid to the idea that we are divided into politically and economically antagonistic categories of experience.
I suppose my point is that there is only us. No future generation or past. Zoom out a few lightyears and I imagine that’s very obvious – another reason why martians would be bewildered here. But the nature of time and motion, on Earth at least, means that there will always be a short straw, generationally speaking. While there is decline, collapse, injustice, there will be people being born into it, who will roam the earth alongside humans that saw a better or worse time. What Covid-19 shows beyond doubt is that there are many different lengths of short straw, and capital always gets the long one.
We are on the precipice of another economic Armageddon. If millennials thought they had a rough time after 2008, then they’d better buckle up. But it’s also clear that the securities of older, property-owning folk are no longer a given. Apart from the obvious murderousness of the UK government’s (lack of) response to the pandemic, the property wealth of baby boomers is already being siphoned off into care costs. Whoever you thought you were, capital’s coming for you.
I think it’s possible to beat capital to the punch. But not without dismantling this category of ‘generation’ – or at least treating it with a pinch of salt. And salt would make it easier to digest the flippant words of six weeks ago, when the pandemic was the ‘boomer remover’ and there was still anyone but the state to blame.